The typographical totalitarianism of Barack Obama

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

-- Michael Bierut interviewed on the graphic design of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, at Newsweek's "Stumper" blog.

Do you think anyone's told Jonah Goldberg?

The Baghdad dawn chorus

There's probably only a couple of days left to download the first episode of the World Service's Eyewitness Iraq (BBC things have a tendency to disappear after seven days, and it's taken me several days to find this one on the website). The programme is a boiling-down of Hugh Sykes's reports from the early days of the conflict, part of the four-year-anniversary ruminations occurring everywhere. What makes it particularly worth listening to, however, is a ten-second edit of 40 minutes of early morning in Baghdad, not long after the Saddam statue came down, with the birdsong and the bangs both intensified to dreamlike levels. It gives an extraordinarily powerful sense of how it might feel to have violence become a constant part of your life's background; one of the most effective pieces of wordless radio I've heard.

Where was I?

London, and away from computers I felt safe blogging on. Sorry for the gap in transmission. In any case, it turns out that the Glorious Revolution doesn't have much to say about the arrival of a Democratic Congress, unless you count this:

The amity of the Whigs and Tories had not survived the peril which had produced it. On several occasions, during the Prince's march from the West, dissension had appeared among his followers. While the event of his enterprise was doubtful, that dissension had, by his skilful management, been easily quieted. But from the day on which he entered Saint James's palace in triumph, such management could no longer be practised. His victory, by relieving the nation from the strong dread of Popish tyranny, had deprived him of half his power.

Our text remains Chapter 10 of Macaulay's History of England; who gets to be William III -- and who you accuse of being James II -- are questions left to the reader.

Sors Vergiliana, Nov 6

"It was on a Sunday, during the time of public worship, that he was conveyed under a guard to the place of his confinement: but even rigid Puritans forgot the sanctity of the day. The churches poured forth their congregatons as the torturer passed by, and the noise of threats, execrations, and screams of hatred accompanied him to the gate of his prison." -- Macaulay, History of England, Chapter Ten.

The official rules of the game are here. I'm not really playing it, preferring the less rigorous exercise of making a note when a few sentences in what I'm reading anyway happen to chime with the day's news. This technique has worked once before in three years, so perhaps I should abandon random retrospective commentary in favour of proper Vergilian prediction.

On the other hand, we're in the middle of the Glorious Revolution here in the History of England. Lord M. is gathering the constitutional convention that will set out the Bill of Rights. I'd like to think he'll come up with something to match the mid-terms -- or rather that the mid-terms will come up with something to match him.

Two depressing thoughts for the weekend

From David Remnick's Reporting (£6.99 in hardback from the bookshop below), Philip Roth's entertainingly precise sketch of literature's route to hell in a handcart:

"Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That's a very easy way to visualise it," Roth said. By "readers", he said, he means people who read serious books seriously and consistently. The evidence "is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end," he said. "The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen, the progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer. There's only so much time, so much room, and there are so many habits of mind that can determine how people use the free time they have. Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. It is difficult to come to grips with a mature, intelligent, adult novel. It is difficult to know what to make of literature. That's why I say stupid things are said about it, because unless people are well trained they don't know quite what to make of it."

And, via Obscene Desserts, a fragment of Iraq news from The Times that reads like the grimmer parts of Ryszard Kapuscinski's African reporting:

The morgue classifies victims according to their injuries; if a victim has been beheaded, he is a Shi’ite killed by Sunnis. If he has been killed by a power drill to the head, he is a Sunni murdered by Shi’ites. Most victims have been tortured. Bodies are dumped by the roadside and lie there for hours.

J Carter Wood couldn't find anything to say after that, and nor can I.

Hospital canteens and the "duty to protect"

Agnes was gentle and indecisive generally, a dove if ever there was, but had flown out hawkishly over the war. Her brother-in-law had been in his prisons, and, though she would not say what had happened to him there, Agnes thought even war was better than letting such things exist.

But if we remove one tyrant, then why not another, she'd said to Agnes; most of the staff at this hospital could give ample reason for us to go to war with their country of origin - every single one of them, if you asked the cleaners.

True, said Agnes; and maybe that's the way ahead.

-- from "The Phlebotomist's Love Life", in Helen Simpson's collection Constitutional. The driver of the story, and the emotion we're probably meant to identify with, is anti-war rage; but I like the opening up of another option.

Commercial note: On the evidence of Amazon, Constitutional's out in paperback on October 5. I hereby claim to be a month ahead of the curve, rather than eight months behind it.

[Constitutional, by Helen Simpson, London, 2005. Seriously accomplished comic stories. The plots flick round like second-hands, but each has the rest of a clock behind it. Adulterous, au-pair-employing suburban London appears to have literary life in it yet.]

After the war

Macaulay on why the politicians of the Restoration were such Bad Men. Long (I forgot how long -- I'm a hundred or so pages south by now) but sadly unlikely to lose resonance:

Scarcely any rank or profession escaped the infection of the prevailing immorality; but those persons who made politics their business were perhaps the most corrupt part of the corrupt society. For they were exposed, not only to the same noxious influences which affected the nation generally, but also to a taint of a peculiar and of a most malignant kind. Their characters had been formed among frequent and violent revolutions and counter-revolutions. In the course of a few years they had seen the ecclesiastical and civil polity of their country repeatedly changed. They had seen an Episcopal Church persecuting Puritans, a Puritan Church persecuting Episcopalians, and an Episcopal Church persecuting Puritans again. They had seen hereditary monarchy abolished and restored. They had seen the Long Parliament thrice supreme in the state, and thrice dissolved amidst the curses and laughter of millions... One who, in such an age, is determined to attain civil greatness must renounce all thought of consistency. Instead of affecting immobility in the midst of endless mutation, he must always be on the watch for indications of a coming reaction. He must seize the exact moment for deserting a failing cause. Having gone all the lengths with a faction while it was uppermost, he must suddenly extricate himself from it when its difficulties begin, must assail it, must persecute it, must enter on a new career of power and prosperity with new associates. His situation naturally develops in him to the highest degree a peculiar class of abilities and a peculiar class of vices. He becomes quick of observation and fertile of resource. He catches without effort the tone of any sect or party with which he chances to mingle. He discerns the signs of the times with a sagacity which to the multitude appears miraculous, with a sagacity resembling that with which a veteran police officer pursues the faintest indications of crime, or with which a Mohawk warrior follows a track through the woods. But we shall seldom find, in a statesman so trained, integrity, constancy, any of the virtues of the noble family of Truth. He has no faith in any doctrine, no zeal for any cause. He has seen so many old institutions swept away, that he has no reverence for prescription. He has seen so many new institutions, from which much had been expected, prodeuce mere disappointment, that he has no hope of improvement. He sneers alike at those who are anxious to preserve and those who are eager to reform. There is nothing in the state which he could not, without a scruple or a blush, join in defending or in destroying. Fidelity to opinions and to friends seems to him mere dulness and wrong-headedness. Politics, he regards, not as a science of which the object is the happiness of mankind, but as an exciting game of mixed chance and skill, at which a dexterous and a lucky player may win an estate, a coronet, perhaps a crown, and at which one rash move may lead to the loss of fortune or life.

You can choose where you want this applied or argued with according to political taste.

The birth of modern political journalism (with a note on how it might die)

The text of today's sermon, like so many of the others recently, is from C.E. Montague. In this case, A Hind Let Loose (1910), his first novel, a farce about crappy provincial journalism. George Roads, a rising press baron, is talking to an unimportant interlocutor about the town's two newspapers, the Tory Warder and the Liberal Stalwart. I have made a snip in the middle, indicated by three dots.

"Still at it, ain't they?"

"At what?"

"Readying folk to read anything else they can get, to be rid of 'em. Bless you, these old party papers! Party! Good Lord!"

"'Party!' says Burke, 'is-'"

"Burke! I dare say. Some Fenian. Tell you, the thing's played out. Why, look about you; take a business man, average business man. He's got no party; not such a fool. He's fluid, not frozen all up. First this way a bit, then that way a bit - that's him. And d'you tell me he doesn't get up, every morning, fair itching to be rubbed a way no paper in this place has ever rubbed him yet? Kept in touch with - that's what he wants to be."

"What's 'kept in touch with'?"

"Told he's right." Roads' audience grew; his audiences had a way of growing...

"What would you pay," Roads pursued, with a corresponding rise of voice, "to be told, first thing when you got down to breakfast you were drunk last night, or you revoked, or ate with a knife, or something? That's what they call the game, I s'pose, these party papers. Why, look at the last war. Do you folks really want to be told a war's wrong when their blood's up? Or right, a year after, when they're sick of it? That's what they do, between 'em, these papers - blackguard their own customer, turn about; soon as one shift knocks off work at saying the country's a fool, t'other'll come on."

If you detect a pre-echo of the Daily Mail's Iraq policy, you should be warned that "Roads" is not a synonym for Harmsworth; the early career Montague gives him is much closer to the Hulton clan, which would make the half-penny morning paper he's planning the Daily Dispatch. And no one needs to make satirical points against the Daily Dispatch any more.

On the other hand, Roads' reader-frottage approach to editing is the foundation of much modern journalism; papers and writers vary according to who they try to rub. This may be an underestimated driver of newspaper resentment of blogs; it is galling to hear populist rhetoric from writers who can get away with rubbing far smaller groups of people than you. Anyone can be a blogger, true; but good blogs, good political blogs particularly, tend to assume a level of knowledge and a precision of partisanship that no one who needs to appeal to a newspaper-sized audience will dare. Homework assignment: rework the Long Tail thesis to fit what's happening to political writing, bearing in mind that the money's more in the patronage and commissions attracted by blog reputation than it is in AdSense, assuming there's any money at all.

War correspondents vs tipsters

Some newspaper-bashing for balance. This is a soldier's cogent explanation of why horse racing ceased during the First World War. Unfortunately, because of C.E. Montague's way with non-RP dialogue, it appears to be spoken by Dick Van Dyke:

The pipers done it. Want to get aht o' pyin' a fair wige to a taht for 'angin' abaht Noomawket 'Eath. It tikes a man o' skill to watch a maw'nin gallop. Not like war correspondin'. Naow use feedin' backers a bag of emowshnal bilge abaht 'eroes an' cheery wounded an' any old muck. A taht must know 'is job. An' wiges accordin'...

-- from "The First Blood Sweep", in Montague's short story collection Fiery Particles.

[Fiery Particles, by C.E. Montague, London, 1923. Scarcely better than the Montague Cockney is the Montague Irishman, distinguished by his fondness for apostrophes and anti-semitism. This collection gives you him at war and at peace. It still manages some penetrating writing, though. The best story is probably "Honours Easy", in which two privileged officers far from the front compete to collect medals. One hunts blue ribbons, the other red. Montague despises them both, but he would never go so far as to transcribe their accents phonetically.]

His media

Andrew Collins has just made a fresh appearance in MediaGuardian's "My Media", possibly to celebrate the second anniversary of his previous one. Although to be fair to him, he has had two different books to plug. And to be fair to them, last time he was recruited for some internal Guardian Media Group squabbling; an additional chance to suck up probably made things feel better all round. Consider:

February 24, 2003 "The only newspaper I've ever read is the Guardian. In these times of trouble, we need it more than ever. But I have stopped taking the Observer since it came out as pro-war. I dislike the papers that eat up the government propaganda about terrorist attacks. I like reasoned coverage." [Read the rest, if you're registered.]

February 21, 2005 "The Guardian is the only newspaper I've ever had every day. MediaGuardian is my favourite bit, and I love Review. I'm an avid reader of the Bad Science column in Life because it annoys me so much. I'm not a great fan of the Evening Standard - I wish there was a better London paper that didn't so hate our mayor." [Ditto.]

Mission accomplished

You may already know this, but George Saunders has solved the problems of Iraq again. And I think I like this one better than the previous version.

Sors Virgiliana, Nov 3

"Sometimes you meet, coming down the leafy path along which you are walking, a man dressed as Napoleon; as he talks to you you look at him with distrust, pity and amusement -- carefully do not look, rather. But as the two of you walk along, and people come up with wallpaper designs full of Imperial bees, rashly offer their condolences on the death of the duc d'Enghien, ask for a son's appointment as Assistant Quartermaster-General of the army being sent to the Peninsula, you realize that it is not he but his whole society that has 'lost touch with reality'" -- Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

[Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell (Faber, 1954). Exhaustingly witty academic and literary satire. You are never more than four sentences away from an epigram. Lots of interesting stuff on the difficulty of seeing other people as fully human; which points up, possibly deliberately, the not-quite-humanness of everybody here described.]

The Brits have a word for it

If you live in the UK and feel superior to US political culture, it may interest you to know that in Washington, chugging appears to be a nameless novelty.

[This is the start of a plan to post occasional stray thoughts here, and journalistic quotations, as well as bits of books. I am still likely to read more than I think, however.]

Illness as metaphor

"Our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into them... Like the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them." -- C.E. Montague, Disenchantment.

He's talking about the English soldiers of World War I. Presumably someone has already written the thesis on venereal disease in post-war writing.

[Disenchantment, by C.E. Montague, Chatto and Windus, 1922. Bellelettristic analysis of the psychological impact of the then Great War, by a leading light of the then Manchester Guardian. Overturns several ideas I hadn't even realised were received by then, in a style heavy on everything -- untranslated chunks of Latin, wide literary reference, long flights of rhetoric -- that journalists are no longer allowed to do.  Given that he appears to have spent 1916-1918 as a censor, the propaganda chapter is perhaps particularly interesting.]